War Stories
by Alara Rogers
Summary: The Enterprise's mission during the Dominion War is interrupted by Q, who's fighting his own war and wants Picard's help, in a way that makes perfect sense to bodiless genderless energy beings and strikes humans as rather... strange. Not humor. Premise is kind of cracky but I'm taking it seriously.
1. Chapter 1

_Captain's log, stardate 50401.3. We have been ordered to the Sesteri system, out at the edges of Federation space, near the Bajoran system. Our orders are to retrieve the data from an automated observation outpost orbiting Sestera V. _

There were no inhabitable planets around the star Sestera. It was a massive red giant that had eaten its inner planets millions of years ago. The automated observation outpost had originally been placed there for scientific reasons - outposts at the edge of Federation space were useful for light-spectrum studies of the distant stars from earlier points in their life cycle than the light that reached the inner planets.

Now, though, the outpost served a much more important purpose. Since the cold war with the Dominion had begun, the outpost had been collecting data on any ship traffic in the area. The Jem'Hadar went cloaked in any areas they _knew_ of Starfleet presence, but this location was not officially claimed by anyone, and there was hope that perhaps they might be detectable when they believed they were unobserved. The _Enterprise_'s mission had been to collect the data directly, in person.

No one had expected Sestera to suddenly destabilize.

"Captain," Data said, "telemetry from Sestera indicates that a nova may be imminent." His tone was not quite as calm as might have been expected from Data; by now he had become somewhat more proficient in using his emotion chip while doing his job.

"Raise shields and take evasive maneuvers, Mr. Hawk," Picard ordered.

"Aye, sir."

"Why would Sestera suddenly go nova?" Riker asked. "Was there anything in the reports from Starfleet indicating that the star was unstable?"

Data suddenly shouted, "Supernova, sir! Shockwave imminent!"

"There's no time - we can't outrun it!" Hawk shouted, hands flying over the navigation console.

Troi suddenly screamed and came to her feet. "Will! _Imzadi!_ No!"

And then the ship jerked, and the stars blurred.

"Data! Lt. Hawk! Report!" Picard snapped out, as Troi crumpled to her knees and Riker ran to her side.

"Deanna, Deanna, it's all right, I'm here, I'm here..." Riker murmured to Troi.

"Captain, we are traveling at-" The stars slowed. "The phenomenon is ending; however, we appear to have been thrown five hundred light years in ten point three seconds."

"All stop, Mr. Hawk."

"All stop," Hawk acknowledged, bringing the ship to a halt - or a relative halt, in relation to the rest of the galaxy, anyway.

"Oh, god, Will..." Troi was clutching onto Riker, trembling. "It was... it was so real, so overwhelming. Even though I could _see_ you there... I felt certain I'd just seen you die."

"Counselor, I'll give you a moment to pull yourself together, and then I'll expect a report. Where are we, Mr. Data?"

"At the edge of the galaxy, sir," Data reported. "The galactic barrier is less than one hour's travel at warp six from here. This is not an area of the edge that any Federation species or ally has previously explored."

"Were we thrown by the shockwave?"

"Unknown at present, but highly unlikely. At such close range the shockwave from a supernova would have most likely destroyed the _Enterprise_, regardless of our shields. And at the moment we began moving, even the subspace compression wave that runs ahead of the realspace shockwave had not reached us yet."

Picard nodded, and turned to Troi, who was unsteadily getting to her feet with Riker's help. "Counselor, can you explain what you just experienced?"

Tears glittered in her eyes, but her face was composed as she looked up at him. "I saw Commander Riker die," she said, her voice still shaken. "Or... not exactly. I didn't see anything. I _felt_ that my first love, my closest friend, had just been killed. And the grief, the disbelief and the horror and pain... it overwhelmed me so completely for a moment that even though I could _see_ Commander Riker, I was still certain he was dead."

"I'm right here, Deanna," Riker said reassuringly. "I'm fine."

"I know, Will," she said, turning to him. "It wasn't my emotion." She looked back at Picard. "Captain, normally when I sense emotions that aren't my own, I can distinguish them from my own. Even when they emanate from particularly powerful minds, such as the beings we encountered at Farpoint Station, and they overwhelm me, I still _know_ they're not my own emotions. This time, though... the broadcast, the mind transmitting the sensation, was so powerful that it annihilated my own sense of self for a moment. For a brief second, it was as if I _was_ that person, experiencing their grief. And I received more detail than usual - most of the time I would only pick up that someone was experiencing grief. This time, it was very distinct - the person's... first love, or greatest love, or best friend... someone we Betazoids would call their _imzadi_... was the one who died." She shook her head. "It was so _strong_, Captain. If I were a full telepath and I'd received their thoughts, perhaps I would have lost my own identity and perceived the sender as if I _were_ them, as Vulcans sometimes do after a mindmeld, but because it was only emotions, I... confused them with my own emotions, and felt as if the person who plays that role in _my_ life had died."

"Are you still picking up sensations from that mind?" Picard asked.

Troi took a deep breath. "Right now I'm detecting the presence of Q. In your ready room."

"Q?"

"That would explain our rapid transit, Captain," Data said. "Our travel was similar in many respects to the transit we experienced when Q sent us to encounter the Borg."

Picard's eyes narrowed. "So Q has something to do with this. I hardly think it's coincidental that a star that previously showed no indications of ill health suddenly went supernova, and at the same time we were graced by Q's presence. You say he's in my ready room, Counselor?"

She nodded. Picard started toward his ready room. "Captain?" Troi called before he'd taken more than two steps.

"Yes, Counselor?"

Troi took a deep breath. "I don't usually sense Q. At Farpoint I sensed him, and of course the incident when he lost his powers... but I didn't notice him during the Robin Hood thing or even the incident with the Borg, although Guinan did. Normally I'd tend to think that if I'm sensing Q it's because he wants me to know he's here."

"But you think there's something else going on right now?"

"Amanda Rogers had an emotional presence like any human being up through the moment she left the ship, but as she embraced her Q identity more strongly the sense I received of her emotions became more powerful. Kevin Uxbridge, who was likely less powerful than a Q but a similar form of life, had to block me with the sensation of music playing in my mind to keep me from reading him. The Q have emotions, and those emotions might even exist on a frequency I can detect if they aren't deliberately shielding themselves, but they have such powerful minds, telepathically..."

Was there a point buried in her rambling somewhere? "What are you trying to tell me, Deanna?"

"I think those were Q's emotions, Captain," she said. "You can't go in there and... treat him the way you normally would, if what I suspect is true. You have to be more careful. Because if I'm right he's just lost someone he loved, and... I know this sounds ridiculous, if we're talking about Q, but be gentle with him until you've gotten him to tell you what's going on, at least."

Picard took a breath and straightened his tunic. That... did change things. He'd been planning to approach Q half-suspecting that Q was responsible for the suffering of whatever being Deanna had been picking up on. If _Q_ was that being... the idea of Q loving anyone or grieving for their death seemed bizarre, but after all the only thing Picard knew of how he related to the rest of his kind was that they'd thrown him out of the Continuum once and that he had treated Amanda as if he was genuinely mentoring her, even though he'd been under orders to kill her if she failed to prove herself Q. The Q could die, if killed by their own or made mortal; perhaps someone he cared for of his own kind had been executed. "Thank you. That's very helpful," he said. "Number One, you have the bridge until I'm back."

Picard walked into his ready room to find Q sitting at his desk.

This was hardly unusual. What was unusual - and what suggested that Troi had been right - was his posture. Normally Q would be leaning back in his chair insouciantly, feet on Picard's desk, smiling up at him insolently. This time Q was sitting with both feet on the floor, hunched over slightly, staring down at his own hands, which were turned up and splayed out on the table as if he expected to see something cradled in them.

"Q?" Picard said. His tone wasn't exactly _gentle_ - he suspected Q wouldn't appreciate being openly pitied by a lowly human - but it wasn't challenging either, merely questioning.

Q looked up at him. His face was gray and bloodless. "She's dead, Picard," he said, his voice almost a monotone.

The first thought that popped into Picard's head was "Who's dead?", but that was far too confrontational and abrasive a way to ask, and besides, he suspected he more or less knew who was dead, if Troi was right. Or at least who she had been to Q. "I'm sorry," he said instead.

"I was just... we were... she'd only come to help me. Because they had a stakeout on you and I wasn't going to be able to get through by myself. She wasn't even on my side. She was just doing this to help _me_, and they... they just _killed_ her." He looked down at his hands again. "Since it started I've known _I_ might die, but she... she wasn't even fighting in it. She was just here to help me. It never occurred to me... I never thought she could be killed."

Picard sat down in the wrong chair, facing Q across his desk. "Who was she, Q?"

"My..." He shook his head, spreading his hands apart in a gesture of helplessness. "I don't even know how to describe it in human terms."

"Counselor Troi thought you might have lost someone you loved. A best friend, or first lover."

Q smiled, a bitter mocking expression. "Trust Troi and her psychobabble to come up with some sort of description for what can't be described." He stared down at his hands again. "We don't... 'lover' has unfortunate connotations, since the sublime experiences we share with one another for pleasure have approximately as much to do with your humanoid habits of grunting and sweating as the acrobatics of a dolphin have to do with a human three year old playing in the kiddie pool."

"'Lover' may connote sex, but 'love' is universal."

Q didn't say anything for a moment. When he finally spoke, it was a hoarse whisper. "I suppose it is," he said. "We were... companions, I suppose you could call it. Each other's... your specific language doesn't have it, for all that you Frenchmen fancy yours to be the language of lovers, but Japanese uses the expression 'most important person' to describe what you would call 'beloved' in English. She was my... most important Q."

"Who killed her?" _And did that have anything to do with the supernova?_ he wanted to ask, but that was too pushy. Seeking scientific knowledge about the relationship between an unexpected supernova and the death of an immortal, powerful being was within his mandate as an explorer, but there had to be a way to do it more tactfully when dealing with that being's bereaved lover.

"The enemy," Q said, unhelpfully. "Who _else_ would have? We haven't exactly had a problem with friendly fire."

"Who are the enemy, Q?" At the impatient look that flashed across Q's face, Picard said, "Look, I'm trying to understand. I had no idea the Q had enemies or that it was possible for you to be killed by any means other than being executed by the Continuum or made mortal."

"Of course," Q said. "Kathy hasn't exactly been burning up the wires with messages home, has she."

"Kathy?"

"You don't know anything about this." He started to chuckle. "Who are the enemy, Picard? Who _else?_ We're our own worst enemy. Who else can kill a Q but another Q?" What had started as a chuckle when he began turned into full-blown bitter laughter, and when he finally choked it off it sounded like it had been on the verge of turning hysterical.

"You have... enemies within the Continuum? Who are killing you?"

Abruptly Q stood, knocking over the chair he was sitting in. He left it toppled on its side as he paced over to Picard's fishtank, staring into it. "You got your calendar ready? You might want to record this one into your log."

"Record what?" Q was even more full of non sequiturs than usual; Picard wondered if he was actually shaken enough by his friend's death not to realize that he wasn't giving Picard nearly enough information to follow this conversation.

"Record that I'm apologizing to you," Q said, staring into the fishtank. "Because I am. I'm sorry. I mean, I was right, you are a grievously savage race, but we... we're not any better, are we." He leaned on the wall with both hands, head down as if he were still looking at the fish tank, but his eyes were closed. "I said this was a great opportunity. I talked about how we could change everything, how we could turn this conflict into a way to upend the status quo and have real freedom in the Continuum for the first time in about half a billion years. I said this could be a _good_ thing-" His voice broke, and he stopped.

This time Picard didn't say anything. Even in his distraught state it had to be obvious to Q that he hadn't actually said what the thing he'd said could be good _was._ After a moment, Q said, "We're having a war, Picard. A revolution."

That didn't sound good at all, no. Picard had studied history. In human history, few revolutions had ever been successful in achieving the freedom or the improvement in the revolutionaries' lives that they had hoped for. Most ended up eating themselves, the inner circle of revolutionaries killing one another for control of the new government, and totalitarian dictatorships rose in their stead. There had been some successful ones - the Americans had pulled it off, but mostly because the government they were overthrowing was the shadow puppet of another an ocean away. Revolutions such as the one his own France had had, or the Russians, where the rulers were right there with the oppressed, hadn't generally ended well.

"I take it you're one of the revolutionaries," Picard said.

Q smiled mirthlessly, opening his eyes and looking up. "I'm _the_ revolutionary. None of the others had the guts to stand up and demand that they stop trying to micro-manage our personal lives until I did it. This entire war is my fault, which I'm sure surprises absolutely no one."

"Did your war have anything to do with that supernova?"

Q looked back at the fish. "Our weapons... have repercussions in your dimension. Every time a Q dies, a star explodes. " He looked at Picard. "I don't _think_ any stars with sentient life orbiting them have gone, yet. But I couldn't swear to that."

The sheer irresponsibility of beings holding wars that could kill billions of innocent sentient beings as collateral damage was infuriating, but Picard held his tongue. It didn't sound like Q was being as cavalier about those possible deaths as Picard would have expected. Still. "From what I know of your people, I assume this isn't because you've been deliberately keeping the major combat away from populated star systems."

"You assume correctly," Q said tiredly. "There's five times as many stars in the galaxy that don't support life in their systems as stars that do. We've been lucky. Or rather, you've been lucky, since whether there was life revolving around the star or not, the fact that it blew up still means a Q is dead."

"It can't go on, Q," Picard said, standing up and approaching him. "You can't allow it to continue. Your Continuum have never seemed to be _monsters_; your society has taken precautions before to avoid your people creating too much chaos for us mortals. Surely you don't approve of accidentally committing genocides."

"We have to win, Picard." He pushed away from the fish tank, to pace around the room again. "A Q killed himself - won the right to kill himself, and did it - because he thought our lives were far too stultifyingly dull to be borne, and... he was right. We can't go on for eternity this way. If they win, they'll lock down what few freedoms we do have, demand a level of conformity we've never had before, so they can maintain control. Instead of a continuum, a broad range of thoughts and ideas in entities that meld into one another but are themselves individuals, we might become a uni-mind. Like the Borg."

"So you'd sacrifice potentially billions of sentient beings to your desire for freedom?"

"You've sacrificed a lot more living creatures than that. To you, the line between life that deserves rights and consideration, and life that can be sacrificed to protect what you want, is drawn between species that can speak and have a consciousness of self, versus those that don't. But there's a lot less difference between you and Data's cat than there is between me and you. We don't draw the lines in the same places you do."

"Then why are you here? Data might pet his cat for comfort at a time of war, now that he has emotions, but he wouldn't explain to her why he's fighting, and I doubt he would risk a friend's life to be able to reach her if she was somewhere safe already."

Q threw his hands in the air. "I _shouldn't_ have come. This is stupid. I should never have let Kathy talk me into this. This is all her fault; Q wouldn't be dead if she had cooperated."

Picard wondered, not for the first time, who Kathy was, but he couldn't afford to get sidetracked. "You must have had a plan, Q. Something you wanted to accomplish by coming here; something that was worth risking your life, your best friend's life. Now she's dead, and I must assume you don't have the power to bring her back. Will you let her sacrifice be in vain, and just vanish off without ever accomplishing what she died to let you do?"

Q's expression grew hard. "You presume to lecture me?"

"I presume to tell you that if you came here for a reason, you're turning your back on your friend's sacrifice not to follow through with that reason, yes."

For several seconds Q stood still, looking at him. Then he went back to pacing. "I don't even know where to begin."

"The beginning is usually a good place."

"Your ignorance is so staggering that even my intellect can't comprehend how to bring you up to speed in the time we have."

"In the time we have? You've never been under any sort of time pressure before; in fact you've stopped time when you felt like it."

"For _you_. Time goes on in the Continuum every moment of my consciousness, and I can't travel within _its_ timeline except the way you travel in yours, one moment at a time. Stopping time wouldn't stop the clock I'm running on."

"Well, then, begin at the end, and answer my no doubt foolish questions as I try to get you to fill in the background. But begin _somewhere._"

Q sighed. "Oh, very well." He sat down on the desk. "There are two factions fighting, and I don't really have much hope that we'll ever get the enemy to shut up and sit down at the table; they're so afraid of Q dying and of things changing that they invented weapons and started killing Q with them, bringing about the most radical change the Continuum has been through in billions of years. And they don't see the fundamental contradiction there, or they don't think it's important, anyway. You can't negotiate with that kind of irrationality. But the majority of the Q aren't on one side or the other. They lean a bit toward the enemy's side, because if the majority of the Q wanted change we wouldn't have had to have a _war_ to get it, but not strongly enough that they want to kill for it. They're just afraid, because Q's philosophy was that the change that the Continuum needed to survive was that individual Q need to embrace death. And most of us don't _want_ to embrace death. We like living, thank you very much. We just want a life that's _worth_ living."

"And you want some way to persuade the Q who haven't taken a side that your desire for change doesn't necessarily entail a desire for other Q to die?"

"Exactly." He hopped off the table. "I thought of the perfect way to do it, too. Change can be death, there's no denying that, but anything that can experience death can experience birth. And what better symbolism to counteract the image of death than new life?"

"Go on."

"Now, we've had a child before, but we killed her parents for it so she's not a very good symbol of new life at all. So I thought to myself, kill two birds with one stone here. The Q lack certain skills, largely because we've never needed them; we're not a very tactful, diplomatic species, for starters. We have a hard time feeling empathy for others, even for other Q who are suffering. We're terrible at compromise. So, I want to introduce new genetic traits to the Continuum, traits like empathy and compassion, while at the same time visually demonstrating that change can mean birth and growth... in fact, such things can arise out of death, and mortals represent death. If I have a child with a mortal, from a species that carries such traits without being hopelessly wimpy about it, I win the ideological battle, I demonstrate to the undecided Q that our beliefs can bring about positive change. They _want_ greater freedoms, it's just that they're afraid that such freedoms might lead to death. I show them that they can live their lives the way they want, and experience things that are new and exciting again, without having to die for it... and they'll come in on my side and the war will just end, like that. Bloodlessly."

"Why would the enemy give up just because the Q who are undecided have joined you?"

Q smiled thinly. "Because if they're on our side, we have a quorum - a number of Q sufficient to wield the Continuum itself against our enemies. And if they continue to fight after we have a quorum, then we would be able to simply sever them from the Continuum, the way they wanted to do to us when all this started. They would cease to be Q."

"And you think you can accomplish all this just by... having a child?"

"Yes. It's brilliant, isn't it? I mean, we could kill them all, but quite aside from the fact that it's certainly possible that they'd kill all of us instead, it's... not an option I want to have to live with having implemented. These aren't mortals, they're not even a bunch of strange alien incorporeals. They're _Q_. I've known them for billions of years. I don't _want_ to kill them all. But if I can get the Q who haven't committed to a side to agree with me, then I don't _have_ to kill them all. Or any of them. They're not stupid; they'll settle down and compromise if they're forced to."

Picard nodded, slowly. "I... can't fault the logic, I suppose. Though I do have to wonder. Ideology can prevent wars, and ideology can cement a peace agreement, but... I've never heard of ideology actually _ending_ a war. Do you really think a symbolic victory will be all you need?"

Q chuckled once, mirthlessly. "I haven't got anything else," he said. He spread his hands. "We're outnumbered, Picard. And as you might imagine, given that we're the freedom faction, the side in favor of change, and an end to regimentation and strict control... getting us to work together is rather worse than herding cats. Military discipline is a bigger oxymoron for us than human intelligence."

Picard ignored the insult. He thought it might be more of a reflex than anything else, anyway; why would Q have come here for help if his opinion of humanity was truly as low as he claimed? "Have you considered trying to negotiate for peace?"

"It can't be done. Picard... I don't think you understand. These people were so afraid of death and of change coming to the Continuum that they _invented a weapon_ and started killing their fellow Q with it. There _is_ no way to negotiate with that kind of irrationality... I need to outnumber them. I need the rest of the Q, the undecided ones, to take my side, because there is literally no other way I can win."

"So you haven't tried."

"Excuse me, but quite aside from the fact that I'm vastly more intelligent than you are, why do you think that _you_ would know better than _I _would about what tactics will work in the Q Continuum?"

Picard frowned. "I assumed you'd come here for some sort of advice about negotiating. If you've never had a war before, I can't imagine that you're very good at negotiating a peace. In fact, didn't you just explain to me that as a species, you lack empathy and tact?"

"I can't negotiate until I have something to negotiate _with_. The order faction won't compromise. If they would, we wouldn't be _fighting._ They're the ones who fired the first shot, not us."

"I thought you said this war was your fault."

"I agitated for change, yes. I created a movement. I didn't exactly expect to get _shot_ at. I'll take responsibility for the fact that the freedom faction wouldn't exist if not for me, and if it didn't exist, obviously they wouldn't be trying to kill us... but I didn't fire the first shot. I was... _trying_ to negotiate, and they..." He trailed off. "It doesn't matter. None of that is the point, anyway. I can't sway the order faction, ever, without the numbers. And I can't sway the undecideds unless I have something I can show them, some symbolic victory as you said. Birth out of death, change leading to new life. They'll go for it, I know they will. They hate this war and what it's done to the Continuum almost as much as those of us who are dying in it do."

"Well," Picard said, "I'll take it for granted that in that respect you know what you're doing. The idea of winning a war by having a child still seems odd to me, at least in this context, but I suppose there have been many wars that have been stopped by the forging of a mating alliance between families on both sides, so I can see a certain degree of precedent."

"Exactly. I thought you'd see it my way," Q said approvingly. "Kathy didn't believe me. _She_ thought it would work to have a child with another _Q._ As if that could possibly solve the problem that we don't have the traits we need to _not_ have wars with each other, now that we have the means of doing so."

"Well, perhaps," Picard said, "but in the short term, why wouldn't it work? Change and new life coming from two Q would be just as effective a statement as a child coming from a Q and a mortal, wouldn't it?"

Q's expression turned dark. "That... might have been a possibility, maybe," he said. "I think my idea is _better_, but... if we could have figured out how to do it, maybe having a child with another Q would have had merit... except that Q is dead. And no one but me believes my plan will work strongly enough to have a child for that sake... and I'm not willing to try, with a different Q. Not now. She might have... but the point is moot, because she's dead."

"All right." Picard nodded, acknowledging Q's point. "Now, I assume that you're not actually turning to a mere imperfect mortal to get my approval of your plan, so there has to be some other reason you came _here_."

"That's right." He sighed. "I think the other parent needs to be a human. You people are the most stubborn, ethnocentric, self-centered species that's actually any good whatsoever with diplomacy that I know; you went from burning fossilized plants and tootling around your little planet on wheeled vehicles to dominating your sector of the quadrant in four hundred years, and you did it by making alliances and persuading people into being friends with you, not by conquest. I don't know any other species that's simultaneously that good at compromise and diplomacy, and also that capable of utter savagery in defending itself when that doesn't work."

Well, that was a series of back-handed compliments if Picard had ever heard any, but it made sense. For all his insults and his torments, Q was obviously fascinated by humanity, or why keep coming back here? And Picard happened to agree that humanity's capacity for forming alliances and friendships, for diplomacy and compromise, was one of his species' greatest talents, so he couldn't say Q was wrong about that. Actually, when you thought about it, it was flattering, that as low as Q claimed his opinion of humanity was, this species was still the one he turned to when he needed to save his own. "I suppose your conflict does demonstrate most of the traditional signs of being an apocalypse," Picard said, lightly, "so perhaps I shouldn't be so surprised to hear you praise humanity, or that I find myself agreeing with your opinion on the matter."

Q smiled wryly. "I don't think I ever actually heard you _say_ 'The day I agree with Q about human nature I fully expect the stars in the galaxy to start spontaneously exploding...' but it does sound like the sort of thing you _might_ have said."

Picard returned the smile, briefly, then grew serious again. "So I suppose I can guess why you're _here_, specifically. You say you want to have a child with a human; are you looking to me to advise you on how to court a human woman, or something like that? Because you must realize, whether or not you have any experience with human females romantically, that asking someone to bear your child is an entirely different thing than asking her to spend the night with you, or even to spend a few years with you." He had talked to Vash, once, since she'd left Q and returned to the Alpha Quadrant. Vash wasn't the sort to kiss and tell, so she hadn't given him any details or even made it clear whether or not she and Q had been romantically involved during their adventures... but the way Vash spoke of him had sounded more like an ex-boyfriend than an ex-business partner, so he assumed Q had probably had sex with a human woman before. But Vash wasn't interested in having a child, at least not at this stage of her life, so he doubted that would have ever come up except as a thing to avoid.

"That's what Kathy said. I pointed out that your culture made a fetish for two thousand years of a woman who agreed to get knocked up by a god, and she said she's an atheist and that human women don't do that kind of thing anymore, and it's somehow morally _offensive_ to human women if someone asks them to have a baby when they don't know the guy, even if it's to stop a war that might possibly accidentally blow up their sun. Which frankly I can't comprehend; you'd think self and species preservation would override any sort of 'oh no, he's treating me like a baby machine like human men used to do 300 years before I was born and I can't have that' attitudes, but apparently human women care more about maintaining their feminist credentials than they do about _ending wars._"

"Q, who is Kathy?"

Q blinked. "You don't know." He laughed again. "Of course you don't know. You probably think she's dead. Kathryn Janeway. Captain of _Voyager._ The rumors of her and her ship's death turn out to be greatly exaggerated."

Picard stared. "Kathryn Janeway is _alive?_ And her crew?"

"They're in the Delta Quadrant. I did offer to send them home if Kathy would just cooperate with me, but no, no, she has to be in _luuuve_ with a man before she'll have his baby, even if he's not really a man and there's the existence of an entire alien species at stake because who cares about whether or not the Q survive, we're _more_ advanced than you and therefore beneath your compassion, or something. And even if the whole war is her fault."

"How is a war between the Q the fault of a human?"

"Well, she was the one who ruled that Quinn should have the right to die." Q sighed heavily. "Of course, I was the one who declared humans sentient and then agreed to bind the Continuum by a human's ruling... and I gave him the poison, but only because he was going to hack himself up with a knife if I didn't. A _knife!_ Billions of years old, one of our most ancient and respected philosophers, bleeding all over the carpet like any other useless mortal." He looked at Picard. "Actually, it's your fault. I would never have ruled humans sentient if you hadn't passed that last test."

"The one where the entire Alpha Quadrant would have been destroyed if I hadn't passed it?" Picard said dryly.

"Yeah, that one. Although actually I wasn't going to let it stand that the whole Alpha Quad would have been destroyed. They'd only ordered me to destroy humanity if you failed." He sat down again, heavily. "But then it's my fault again because I was the one who agitated to be able to perform the sentience test. But that was _their_ fault because they wanted to destroy you people and I couldn't protect you from them indefinitely unless you were declared sentient. I mean, sooner or later all the Q who've gotten their britches in a knot over something I did to them were going to figure out that if they threw in their vote with the we-hate-humanity crowd they could outnumber the we-don't-care-about-humans-but-we-like-to-piss-off -the-stuffed-shirts folks, and then because I was assigned to humanity _I'd_ have been the one to have to do it, and... no. You're much too entertaining for that."

Picard was aware that he was probably staring stupidly, and he really ought to avoid looking totally flabbergasted in front of Q, but the things Q was saying were, frankly, flabbergasting. "Are you telling me that the Q wanted to destroy humanity and _you_ advocated for us?"

"Not _the_ Q, some Q. Most of us didn't care. Actually, come to think of it, it more or less lined up with the sides that became the war. You're a fast-growing species and the changes you've brought to your little piece of your galaxy are honestly monumental given the time you did it in. Those of us who like change find it refreshing. The ones who are obsessed with the perpetual status quo were not so thrilled."

"And you advocated for us."

"Well, what? I was always the biggest agitator for change, what did you think I was going to do? Resign myself to stultifying boredom because some scaredy pants are afraid every time anything looks remotely interesting that oh dear, someday in ten billion years it might be a threat?"

"I... had never thought about it, honestly, because I had never comprehended that as ancient and powerful a species as yours could possibly have any members who were genuinely frightened of humanity."

"So when you said exactly that, that we must be afraid of you, after I gave Riker the powers, you were what, lying?"

"No, I just didn't believe that anything you were saying was necessarily true. And I've interacted with you often enough since then that I'm _still_ having a hard time believing any of you could seriously be afraid of us."

"Again, I repeat: these people were so afraid of change and death coming to the Continuum that they _invented weapons_ and started _killing Q_ with them. What about that statement makes you think these Q are remotely rational?"

"Point taken."

"So yes. I got the Continuum to give me the right to perform the test that would define you as sentient or not, because if you were defined as sentient they couldn't just wipe you out to spite me, and they dictated the terms of the test, which is why I was required to destroy your species if you failed. And you passed. So when Kathy's little tugboat found the comet we'd imprisoned Q in, and I went to go retrieve him and it was going to get very, very circular because neither of us wanted to go all out against the other, she suggested she could rule on the matter... and more fool I, I agreed. Because it wouldn't look particularly confident in my own judgment of humanity if I went and got you declared sentient and then refused to accept one of you as an arbitrator on the grounds that you're too stupid."

"Why was he imprisoned in a comet?"

"Because he wanted to die." Q stalked over to the replicator. "Does this thing make real alcohol or do I have to make it myself?"

"It doesn't, but you don't have to make it yourself." Picard went to the cabinet and took out one of the bottles of his family's wine. "I'm afraid this isn't our best vintage; I lost some of the bottles of the best years when the Enterprise D crashed on Veridian. But I can guarantee that it's the best you'll get here, given that firstly, I no longer have a lounge and a bartender, and secondly, Guinan would probably have refused to serve you anyway."

Q smiled wryly. "That's very hospitable of you, Jean-Luc. Yes, thank you."

Picard took out two glasses and poured one for Q, then one for himself. This almost felt surreal. He was finding it hard to believe that he was in his ready room pouring Q a drink. But then, Q's claims regarding the temporal anomaly test were upending much of his beliefs about his interactions with Q. Q could be lying, or self-servingly exaggerating, but Picard didn't think so; Q's emotional attention was focused on his war and his grievances with others of his kind. He wasn't trying to puff himself up in front of Picard, he was asking Picard's help with something... Picard presumed assistance with finding a mother for his child, though Q had not actually admitted to anything specific yet. And he seemed much more interested in ranting about the various stupidities of his opponents, which seemed to include their opinion of humanity, than actually making himself look good.

Which, if true, meant that Q hadn't merely helped him pass that final test. Q may have literally saved humanity from his own kind by forcing the test on Picard and then helping him pass it.

Q drank half his wine in a single gulp. Picard wondered if the wine actually affected him as it would a human. He supposed it had to have some effect or Q wouldn't have asked for it. Picard waited until he set the glass back down and then asked, "Can you explain why Q wanting to die led the rest of you to imprison him in a comet?"

"That's the whole reason for the war, Picard." Q sipped again. "Q thought that we needed to change, to grow, that we were stagnating... which I agreed with. But he thought the change we needed was that some of us needed to embrace death. That we needed to stop being immortal or we would never change. This... did not endear the concept of change to most of the Q."

"I can see why you would disagree with his philosophy, but why imprison him?"

"Because he was trying to kill himself. We thought it was the only way to save his life. We thought if we stuck him in there long enough, he'd give in and stop wanting to die." He stared down into his glass. "Q usually do give up and stop sticking to their beliefs if we leave them in there long enough. I did after six years. We had him in there for three hundred."

"It doesn't seem like imprisoning a person who is suicidal, away from any friends or family, without giving him therapy, would not be the best strategy for making him feel less suicidal."

"Yeah, well, we don't do therapy and most of the time we don't do suicide." He sat back down again. "Even when I tried it, I mean, I was miserable and I hated living as a human and I thought it would be easier, but I wouldn't have done it if not for the part where the Calamarain were going to kill me whether I wanted it or not, and the only question was how many extra mortals were going to go down with me."

"So Voyager accidentally let him out of the comet, he still wanted to die, you tried to retrieve him and couldn't, so Captain Janeway offered to rule on... what? Whether he should be allowed to die or not?"

"Exactly." Q downed the rest of his glass. "Your Federation doesn't let mentally ill people run off and kill themselves no matter how much they want to do it, because they're mentally ill, and if they were well they wouldn't want to do it. But you do allow people with incurable terminal illnesses choose to die before nature would have taken its course so they can die with dignity, without pain. Q's argument was that the ennui he was suffering from was an incurable illness causing him pain and he wanted to die because life was so mind-numbingly boring; I was arguing that he was crazy. I mean, I'm bored all the time and I don't want to kill myself."

"But Janeway disagreed."

"She decided he was a political dissident, not mentally ill, and it was a violation of his freedom to prevent him from choosing to die if he wanted to." Q looked at the floor. "And she was right. I should have seen it from the beginning, but... I didn't want him to die. I voted to lock him up, even though theoretically I was opposed to the Continuum impinging on our personal freedoms, because I didn't want him to die... but it was hypocrisy, because I _am_ opposed to the Continuum impinging on our personal freedoms, so I was violating my own principles because... for purely emotional reasons, and I hate when people do that. So she was right."

"If she was right then how is the war her fault?"

Q sighed. "It's my fault. It all comes back to me. I let her make the ruling, I let it stand, I gave him the poison, I used his sacrifice to agitate for freedom because it's only a matter of time before _all_ of us want to die if nothing changes and we keep stagnating, and I got people actually willing to stick their necks out and support me. Which terrified my ideological enemies, because they couldn't shut me up by getting the rest of the Continuum to mock me anymore, not if I had supporters. So this one oldster made a gun because he thought that the existence of a weapon would be so awful and frightening that we would stop arguing, kind of like how Alfred Nobel thought inventing dynamite would end all war. He didn't spend enough time hanging around mortals to know how stupid that was."

"And then, the existence of a gun allowed it to be used."

"Sure. Don't you know a gun hanging on the wall has to be used by the third act?" Q looked up at him. "See, what one Q knows, we all know, except that we were arguing so much and so viciously that the Continuum itself was fracturing, so no one could read the minds of the guys on the other side anymore. So old Granddad made the weapon, and fired it during negotiations, but he fired it over everyone's head to demonstrate he had it. And I was in the middle of negotiating and I thought it was all going to work out, finally, they're willing to come to the table, I _knew_ he wasn't going to actually use the weapon. Except that everyone ideologically aligned with him knew how to make one too. And someone who absolutely hated my guts for purely personal reasons decided to shoot me. And a Q who wasn't even my friend, he just believed in my beliefs, he shoved me out of the way. So he got shot instead." Q's hands clenched on the table. "An event that has since happened with distressing frequency."

"Q being shot, you mean?"

"Well, yes, but I specifically mean Q being shot when the gun was aimed at me. He... was not the last one to suffer that particular fate." He looked down at his hands, opened them. "She was... she was undecided, she just agreed to help me because she might have been a goddess of war but that didn't mean she wanted it in our backyard, she had combat experience, she thought she could protect me long enough to get me here. And she was right. She could. It took her life, but hey, what's yet another Q dying in this pointless, stupid, _fucking_ war so I can live on and keep fighting?"

His voice was breaking. Q, omnipotent, untouchable Q, was on the verge of tears.

"I understand," Picard said. He put his hand on Q's shoulder. He didn't know what else to do. He'd have done the same for a crewman or a fellow Starfleet officer who lost their wife or lover in combat, particularly if she'd been bodyguarding them at the time. "I'm sorry for your loss, Q. I know how much it hurts to see a friend die; I can't imagine how much worse it would be if you had spent your life expecting your friend to be immortal."

"It has to end," Q said, so quietly Picard could barely hear him. "I have to end it. But they won't listen, they didn't before and now that there's blood they most certainly won't, and even if I were willing to surrender, which I'm not, my supporters wouldn't, and... we've got to win. We have to win, or we will all die, and probably bring down a significant part of the galaxy with us."

"Yes. You're quite right. It has to end." Picard let Q's shoulder go. "So you came to me. But I'm not sure how much help I can give you. I do have more experience with human women than you probably do, but I've never wanted children, and I've never been in a position where I needed to have one to end a war. I'm sure someone might be willing, perhaps if she's infertile and wants children; perhaps I can help you find someone who would be interested."

"What?" Q turned in the chair, looking up at Picard, startled. "Oh, no no no. I didn't come here for a matchmaking service, Picard, Kathy already made it clear to me. It won't work that way." He stood up. "She said I have to be willing to make personal sacrifices. So. I'm going to take a female form, I'm going to endure what will undoubtedly be the nightmarishly hellish experience of pregnancy, because my expert advisor in human women says that that's what I'd need to do to get you to agree to do this."

"Get... me?" Picard felt, abruptly, as if he were falling down a rabbit hole.  
"Yes, obviously." Q grinned, and there was his old self back in the grin, the insouciant, devilish smile Picard associated with Q's mischievous side. "I'm here to ask _you_ to father my child."

* * *

_Notes: This story is in the same continuity as "Plan B" (in the Voyager section), "A Doctor, A Q and a Baby", and Chapter 15: "Knitting" in "Seventeen Things That Might Have Happened To Q." It is multi-chapter. It is eventually going to become M rated but it isn't there yet so it's getting a T for now. And yes, this is another incomplete fic I have started, and maybe I should try to finish one before starting another, except no, I'm not gonna. This story will be Picard/Q pairing with Q genderswapped because personally I feel mpreg is silly and I like genderswaps; however Q in a female body is still Q and still kind of a sarcastic, snarky asshat. There will also be a major role played by Will Riker, and while the focus of this story is P/Q and not the Imzadi pairing, Riker/Troi is kind of sitting there in the background. _

_I didn't warn for character death because frankly I suspect I am the only one who will mourn her, but for anyone who actually cares... Suzy-Q is dead in this fic. She died heroically, she's not coming back, Q is really depressed about it. *I'm* depressed about it because I really, really like Suzy-Q, but this story required her to be dead, so she is. I think it's pretty clear who Q is talking about when he talks about his dead friend, but just to avoid any possible confusion, yes, it is the Q who in the canon continuity he had a son with._

_Also, for the record: personally I think Janeway totally made the right decision. Q whining about her refusal to help him is Q being Q, not the author thinking Janeway should have agreed to mate with him. There is no Janeway bashing in this story aside from Q being an asshat, which, let's face it, it would be OOC if he wasn't._


	2. Chapter 2

_Note: Slight revisions made to prior chapter. More notes at bottom._

* * *

After a moment Picard realized his jaw was gaping slightly. He closed it resolutely. "_What?_"

"Oh, come now, Jean-Luc, don't tell me you didn't see this coming," Q said. "Honestly you were always the best choice anyway, but until I talked to Kathy... well, let's put it this way, I wouldn't even _begin_ to contemplate enduring the horror of a voluntary parasitic infestation if it weren't for the fact that Kathy made it clear that no one else is going to. Besides, the enemy had a stakeout on you... which is why I needed help to get here." He lost the grin. "So I _really_ hope this works out."

Picard shook his head. "Q, this is—this is _ridiculous._ How can you—this is simply absurd!" He realized he was on the verge of spluttering, but after what Q had just said, he thought some degree of being unable to come up with any words aside from "ridiculous" was justified.

"Why?" Q asked. "I told you my intention to have a child with a human, and you agreed that it might work. You even offered to help. Why does it suddenly become absurd because I'm asking you to help _personally?_"

Put that way, it did sound slightly less ridiculous, but Picard was finding it very hard to believe Q could possibly be serious. "This isn't—I _know_ you, Q. It's one thing to approach someone who has no history with you..."

"Oh, I see the problem," Q said, scowling. "I keep forgetting about the limitations of your primitive mind. You can't grasp that I'm serious because, for all your intellectual understanding of my capabilities, you can't _look_ at me and comprehend me as a being you could be capable of mating with." He snapped his fingers. There was a characteristic flash of light. "This should work better."

Where Q had been a moment ago there was... well, Picard still _knew_ it was Q, but there was no point of resemblance aside from the expression on her face. She was a tall, young-looking, sensually built woman with milky pale skin and ringlets of platinum blonde hair. Instead of a modern Starfleet uniform, she wore the uniform that had been current when they'd first met Q at Farpoint, the body-hugging jumpsuit that had been incredibly annoying to wear, and it looked as if it had been poured onto her. She still had captain's pips, but now they looked downright bizarre because she looked younger than he'd been when he became the youngest captain in Starfleet. She smirked at him. "Is this better, _mon capitaine?"_ she said in a voice that sounded exactly like a woman with an attractive voice in the alto range doing a perfect imitation of Q's speech patterns.

"_No_," Picard snapped. "For gods' sake, Q, if you mean me to take this seriously, this is _not_ the way to go about it!"

"Why not?" she asked, sitting herself on Picard's desk, legs crossed, in a gesture Q was certainly capable of but which had an entirely different implication in this form. "Obviously, I can't convince your primate hindbrain that I'm absolutely sincere about this request without taking a female form. Is this one not to your liking?"

"No, it's not. You look much too young and frankly like a parody of what human men are expected to want in a woman. Either you're mocking me, or you actually have no idea what I'd find attractive, presuming that you're in fact trying to be attractive and not playing some absurd game."

She frowned. "I thought better of you, Jean-Luc. To look down on a woman's capabilities because she's young and sexy. For shame. I'll have you know the young lady I borrowed this form from annihilated an entire civilization with it and _then_ helped to engineer a peace with the survivors."

"I'm sure she was quite brilliant and deadly, but she doesn't look a damn thing like you and she's much too young for me." He found himself wondering why he was playing along with Q to the extent of arguing that this ludicrous form change wasn't attractive enough, as if he actually thought Q could manage to be attractive to him in a different form when he still knew it was Q, or as if that would even be a good idea if Q pulled it off. But he didn't see any other way to shoot down Q's new strategy except by playing along.

"Well, then, I'm sure this will be more to your preference."

She flashed again. When she reformed, Picard actually growled at her. "Take your _own_ form, Q! Or do you have so little imagination that you perpetually need to steal someone else's?"

The red-haired woman who looked almost exactly like Kamala looked puzzled. "This is someone else's form?" Then she hit herself in the head. "Oh, of course, your empathic metamorph! She got to it first. How unfortunate."

"What do you mean 'got to it first?'"

She slid off the desk, standing up, and began to pace, her body language an eerie replica of Q's normal movement patterns. She looked just like Kamala, but her speech patterns and body language were entirely Q, and the contrast was disturbing. "I didn't take her form, Picard, I just pulled your Platonic ideal of the perfect woman out of your head. Unfortunately for me, so did she, so now you've got it in your mind that that's actually what she looked like and your ideal woman was a real person, conveniently overlooking that the entire reason she looked like that was that she bonded to you by accident." She sighed. "It's really too bad. You've got good taste."

"I don't need you to be in a woman's form, Q. I want to have this discussion with you in your _own_ form."

"Yes, that would be convenient for you, wouldn't it? It'd be so much easier to say no if I looked exactly like the entity you've been saying no to for a decade. But you do realize... the form you're familiar with isn't any more my own form than this is. I mean, you _do_ realize that, right? You're not a total idiot?"

Picard sighed heavily. "Yes, I do know that," he said. "But I'm not a telepath, nor do I have any specialized senses that would allow me to tell that it's you in two totally different bodies. You appeared to us as a human in the first place so we could comprehend you; you must have realized that we would associate that form with your identity, or you wouldn't have kept showing up in it. I can't look at you in these female forms and recognize _you_. I know it's you, but when I know someone has an identity and yet they look nothing like that identity, my primate hindbrain, as you put it, tells me they're lying to me."

"How can I possibly be lying to you about who I am when I'm changing forms right in _front_ of you?"

"I _know_ you're not actually lying to me, Q, not in any real sense, but you're trying to manipulate me by looking like something you're not!"

"I always look like something I'm not! It's a little late to object to it now, Picard."

"Yes, but you flat out admitted to me that you want to look female because you don't think I can imagine mating with you otherwise, and you don't want to look like yourself because I always say no to you. That is manipulation. And you've admitted to it."

"Oh, what, would you prefer _this?"_

Now the body was still Kamala's... but the head was Q's normal, male head, stuck on the top of Kamala's body. "_No!_" Picard shouted. "If you're going to make a mockery-"

"Oh, this wasn't what you were looking for?" Q's head said in his normal, male voice. "You were so adamant that I look like myself..."

"You look like a bad holographic comedy routine. Take your _own_ form!"

"Very well, then." Another snap, another flash.

Picard stared for an entirely different reason, this time.

She was still female. But this time, she was obviously Q, her resemblance to her usual male form inescapable and yet nothing about her seemed less than perfectly female. Her dark brown hair was slightly longer, styled in a more feminine manner than Q had ever done before, but it was still Q's hair. She was still tall, still taller than Picard, but by much less of a margin now. Her hips were wider, her shoulders were narrower, she had breasts, and her torso was shorter but her legs were the same length, which made them look very, very long in the Farpoint-era jumpsuit and women's uniform boots. She looked about the same age Q had looked at Farpoint, too. Q's normal form was about the same build as Riker, tall and imposing but without the overemphasis on physical strength that other big men like Worf displayed. This was the female version of that; tall, imposing, strong-looking but not emphatically so, the kind of woman you could buy a drink for in a bar who could then back you up in a bar fight, if she liked you enough. Her brow ridges and Adam's apple were gone, her nose was slightly smaller and her chin just a little softer... but she had Q's exact same intense eyes and Q's same full lips. Picard found himself thinking that actually, putting Q's lips on a woman's face looked surprisingly appropriate, as if Q's lips had always been sultry and feminine and he'd just never noticed in the context of a man's face.

He straightened his uniform shirt, almost unconsciously, and then berated himself for showing Q that much weakness. He hadn't thought Q could come up with a form that didn't look like some sort of parody, or a disguise, or for that matter anything he could actually find attractive given that he knew it was Q. This was Q, but entirely female, as natural-looking as Q's usual form was. As if she'd always been a woman. Which made sense because Q wasn't really any more a man than a woman, so if Q had managed for ten years to look exactly like a human man, probably Picard had underestimated Q by assuming Q couldn't look exactly like a human woman and still look enough like the form he was familiar with that he could recognize her.

"I see this one meets your requirements better," she said, in a different entirely female voice that was doing a perfect imitation of Q's speech patterns than the first one she'd used. "Is this enough 'my own form' for your tastes, Picard, or are you impossibly hung up on the shape of physical objects?"

Damn her. It was going to be very, very difficult to argue against this form without Q using his arguments to paint him, and all humanity, as idiots... which perhaps he shouldn't be concerned about right now, since Q wasn't here to test humanity, but it was too ingrained in him not to let down the side in front of Q. But he couldn't realistically say she didn't look enough like the form he was familiar with; she looked more like Q's usual form than Picard now looked like himself when he'd been a young man at the Academy, with hair. And he wasn't going to make the argument that she was unattractive even if it were true, which it wasn't, because that would imply that he actually cared whether she was attractive or not.

But... _damn_ her. She was stunning.

Well, she wasn't really. She was hardly an imago of feminine perfection any more than Q had ever been one of masculinity; her nose was still a little too big, her eyes too closely set, for classical beauty, and objectively, if one removed identities from the picture, she wasn't as attractive to him as the Kamala form had been, or for that matter Beverly. The problem was that identities were in the picture. He'd have thought that knowing a woman was Q would have protected him against any interest in her whatsoever. What he was finding was the exact opposite. All the things he normally felt about Q, the annoyance and the reluctant fascination and the sharp spike of adrenaline from the danger and the opportunities Q represented, not fear exactly but hyperalertness, and the old anger and the old gratitude and all of it, had transmuted somehow, so that all those feelings were still there but dammit, so was attraction. And it didn't seem to matter that he was honestly angry at her right now for manipulating him like this or that he had never actually _liked_ Q or that he knew that even if she was telling the truth about what she wanted she was still dangerous and still totally cavalier about completely disrupting his life. He couldn't take his eyes off her. Dammit.

And she knew exactly what she was doing, too, and she was doing it on purpose, and he couldn't even blame her for mentally manipulating him or using her powers or something, some way he could deny any responsibility for this and put all the blame on Q. All she'd done was change forms. He knew that. He would never have guessed, before Q had done it, that he'd actually find Q attractive in a female form, but the things he felt right now were entirely too much like everything he'd felt every time he'd been attracted to a woman who annoyed the hell out of him, or who'd treated him like garbage, or whose beliefs and morality were in utter opposition to his own, or who'd held power over him and had been entirely too willing to use it against him, for him to believe Q was using her powers to make him feel this way. And the worst part was that he felt fairly sure he wouldn't have been nearly as attracted to her if he hadn't known she was Q. Which implied things about his feelings about Q that... he really couldn't afford to think about with the entity standing right there.

And he'd spent much too much time without speaking, much too much time looking at her, and she was smirking and she obviously knew the effect she was having, and if he tried to argue her out of keeping this form he'd be admitting to far, far too much weakness. She might know how she'd affected him, but Picard had never tried to pretend to Q that he didn't have normal human weaknesses; the important thing he'd always tried to get across was never that he was impervious to human emotions but that he was never going to let them affect his behavior. "Fine, Q," he snapped. "If you absolutely insist in taking a female form, you may as well keep this one. At least I can recognize you."

Her smirk got bigger. And then vanished, as her expression turned serious again. "So now that we've gotten all this nonsense out of the way," she said, and started to pace around his office again. "Nothing I told you before has changed. I still need to have a child to win the ideological victory I need to bring the undecided Q in on my side, which is still most likely the only way I can possibly win my war. I still need to have a child with a mortal, of a species with the traits needed to achieve compromises and maintain peace, to bring the Continuum the ability to not start up another war in the future now that we have weapons. Therefore, I am still here to ask you to be the mortal parent of that child. For the sake of suns not blowing up in your dimension, even if you care nothing whatsoever about the welfare of my people. And since I'm well aware that you human males find the concept of pregnancy as appalling as I do, and since Kathy made it excruciatingly clear that no human, man or woman, is going to agree to endure the utter hell of a pregnancy for the sake of saving the Q, I am offering to do all the _hard_ work and actually gestate the adorable little parasite."

Picard wondered if Janeway had engaged in some extreme hyperbole about pregnancy for the sake of convincing Q she was not going to say yes, and if maybe in fact she'd needed to to get "no" through his head, and exactly how rude Q had been about the proposition in the first place. Most human women didn't seem nearly as negative about the concept of pregnancy as Q seemed to think. Or maybe Janeway had the same opinion of children that Picard did, or maybe it was really just Q's opinion of pregnancy. Though to be fair Picard was having a hard time imagining even the most baby-crazed human woman being willing to have a child with _Q_. Of all people. "Why me?"

"I told you. Kathy wouldn't do it."

Picard sighed. "That does not answer the question, Q. You have access to every human being who has ever lived. Why me? For that matter, why humanity? You've been quite vocal about our shortcomings in the past."

"I don't bother to tell primitive species that they're primitive unless I'm fairly sure they have some hope of improvement in the near future. You notice I never put the Klingons on trial."

"No, but you've never missed an opportunity to insult Worf."

"Oh, I know, it's like shooting fish in a barrel, but it's such tasty fish. I mean, he's right _there_." She grinned. "I confess it would take a Q with more impulse control than I have to pass that up."

"I would have imagined that would cover most of you, although now that I hear you're having a war, I have to wonder."

She applauded. "He shoots, he scores! Managing to insult both me and the Q as a whole in one sentence. Bravo!" Q came up to him, much too close, the same stunt of standing much too far inside his personal space that Q was always pulling. "And that is why you. Because you're compassionate. You're diplomatic. You have tremendous self control. You're ethical to the point where it's really, really annoying. And you're supremely arrogant, convinced you know better in virtually any situation, stubborn to a fault, aloof, much more comfortable with keeping people out than letting them in, quite witty for an inferior life form, and capable both of enforcing your personal moral beliefs on everyone you've been assigned power over, and keeping your nose out of the business of everyone you haven't been, even though you do have the power to demand that a significant percentage of the people you meet do things the way you think makes sense. In short you would make a perfect Q, while still possessing exactly the traits the Q most need to survive."

Picard stood his ground, despite his usual overwhelming desire to back away, get Q out of his face by getting away from the entity, and looked directly into her eyes. "I have no desire to be a Q."

Q stepped backward, pivoting, making it look more like restless energy than backing off. "Yes, yes, I know, and I have no ability to make you one, not now. With the Continuum fractured, no new linkages can be forged between the Continuum and anyone new. If you've never been a Q, then right this moment, you can't become one. Otherwise the solution to my problem would have been to give a whole bunch of mortals Q powers so they could wield our weapons and fight by our side." She paced around his office again. "But it's a matter of genetics. Your child can be expected to carry at least some of your traits, and you have none which could end up fatal for a Q. Unlike, say, Troi, who's so soppy and Goddess of Empathy and so in tune with everyone's _feelings_, she'd lose her sense of self and dissolve into the Continuum very, very rapidly. There's a reason we're arrogant and self-centered; Q who weren't didn't survive the Continuum very long."

"It sounds lovely," Picard said dryly.

"Yeah, there's also a reason some of us don't like to spend much time there." Her expression darkened for a moment. "But that's one of the things we're trying to change here. You're a diplomat, and a very, very successful one, and you can work quite well within a hierarchy and have done so for most of your life, and yet you are also unbelievably arrogant and stubborn and convinced you're right. You're my living proof that a being with the traits the Q need to maintain peace can actually survive the Continuum." Q smiled wryly. "Kathy's close; she's got a lot of those traits as well. But she's not you. My reasons for asking her first were practical and, I admit, there was some... personal reluctance at work as well, but if I'd made the decision based on who matches what I need the most precisely, it would always have been you."

"But... you have access to every human who has ever existed. Surely I cannot possibly be the most perfect representative of these... traits... that you want, throughout all of space and all of human history."

"You actually think you are. Admit it, Picard. You just think you ought to behave more humbly than you feel."

Picard sighed. "I don't actually think I am. Perhaps your accusation that I'm arrogant has some slight basis in fact, but I'm not that arrogant. I can't be the best human ever."

"You're the best human I know." She leaned against the wall, looking at the fishtank again. "You're not getting it, Picard. I'm under _time pressure_. I do not have time to conduct elaborate tests on every human who has ever existed or thoroughly research their lives the way I have for you. I've studied many, many humans, and of them, you're the best choice, and I don't have time to do any additional research. So yes, maybe sometime in the 12th century there was some Chinese woman who would have been perfect and also female and willing to have my baby in exchange for the secret of alchemy or something, but if there was, I don't know her and I don't have time to look. I risked my _life_ to come here, Picard, I... I did in fact get my best friend killed trying to get to you so I could ask you this. Do you think I'd have done that lightly?"

"I can't even be the best choice you know, Q. I've never wanted children."

"What, and I have? Picard, at least your species has always been capable of reproduction! If you're not a father, it's only because you were lucky; you slipped up on getting your implants updated more than once, and on some of those occasions, your female partners were also behind on their shots. Yes, you personally never really wanted children, but you always knew it was within the realm of possibility. I've spent five billion years being quite comfortable with the idea that my species _has no children_. Ever." She shook her head. "If we're playing 'Who's Less Likely to Be Good Parent Material', I'm far ahead of you."

Picard agreed with that, though possibly not for the reasons Q had. "If your species has never had children, where did you come from?"

"What makes you think we came from anywhere? Perhaps we've always existed."

"Philosophically that falls into the First Cause fallacy. Though I suppose it's possible that you actually don't know where you came from."

Q laughed. "No one gets one past you, Jean-Luc." She sat down on his desk again, this time with her legs swinging free, nothing overtly seductive about her pose. "We used to create new Q, billions of years ago, but we haven't done it in a very, very long time. And even when we did, they were never children. Those of us who were created by the Continuum were... not precisely adults, more like adolescents, at the moment of our creation. I have a little sister who spent about half a billion years sticking nebulas everywhere because 'nebulas are sparkly', but she was never an infant... and, aside from the Q who used to be mortals that we invited to join us, she's the last one. For the past billion years or so, every new Q was an adult mortal we invited in."

If Q was going to sit, Picard was going to do so as well, otherwise it came across as if Q was in charge and Picard was standing on the carpet in front of her, which, given that this was his office and Q was asking a favor of him, was absurd. He walked back to his desk and sat down in his chair. "But if you ever did create new Q, then presumably, it's not an entirely new thing. Why would that be so revolutionary to you?"

"The whole Continuum made us. You ever read Brave New World?"

"The 20th century one or the 22nd century?"

"The 20th century, of course. The 22nd century book of the same name was a total waste of time."

"I've read both, actually."

"So you remember, the society in the book manufactured children in laboratories. Although Huxley still had them being born as infants, they were children of the entire society as a whole, without individual parents, and their growth was shaped, almost dictated, by the genetic mixture they were made with and the education they received. Children born to two parents, by random chance, were unheard of, except among the 'savages.'"

"But the society considered the entire concept horrifying. The mother of the 'savage' character had never wanted him, and he was an outsider."

"The difference is that the majority of those people were bred to be stupid, in varying degrees, and submissive, and very easily entertained with repetitive nonsense. None of the Q were ever created to those standards. We're mostly all bored out of our minds because nothing is ever different. And the undecideds aren't so bored they'd rather die than keep living this way, not like those of us in the freedom faction... but they are bored. Everyone is." She got off his desk and stood in front of it, leaning forward toward him, her hands on the surface supporting her. "A child isn't just a symbol of new life; it's actually a new thing, in a society that's been horrifically devoid of new things for aeons. Amanda's existence proves it can be done and it can produce a viable Q, but we spent Amanda's entire childhood on tenterhooks wondering if we were going to have to kill her; she ended up being perceived as a symbol of death. Which, let me tell you, she's really been milking lately. The other side are positively terrified of her." Q smiled proudly, straightening up.

Picard tried to imagine the sweet, shy blonde girl being terrifying. There'd been moments, when it had looked like Q might teach her the same complete disregard for human lives the rest of the Q seemed to have, but how could her peers fear her? "Just because she's a symbol of death?"

"No. Because she's the deadliest Q in the war. She brought us the weapon - saved all our bacon, we were going to be massacred because we didn't have it and they did - and it's never bothered her nearly as much to kill other Q as it has the rest of us, because she doesn't have billions of years of history with them. And because she grew up believing her death was a possibility. And because when she decides to look like a mortal she's practically invisible. So she can practically walk up to an enemy before they notice her, and she's got no hesitation before pulling the trigger." Q's smile was actually tender now. Picard didn't think he'd ever seen such an expression on Q's face. "They call her the Deathchild, and she's living up to it. But don't get me wrong, she wants an end to this as much as the rest of us do. She's really turned out to be quite a delightful person, actually. It's just... you cannot use your deadliest soldier as a symbol of new life no matter how delightful she is."

"But aren't you concerned that the other Q will associate a new child with the sense of deadliness that they've associated with Amanda?"

"No, because the undecideds aren't scared of her. She's still the smallest, weakest, least experienced Q in the Continuum. Without the factor of the weapons... it'd be like being afraid of a kitten. It's just that against the enemy, the kitten's got some very sharp claws." Q poured herself another drink from Picard's bottle. "It doesn't matter anyway when you think about it. If this doesn't work, I'm most likely dead and so are the rest of us. Did I mention that the enemy outnumbers us, Picard?"

"You did, yes."

She drank most of the glass in one draught, and set it down hard. "So. Pedal to the metal, Picard. You know what's at stake. You know what I've sacrificed to ask you for this. Yes or no?"

Picard stood again. "It's not that simple, Q."

"In the end, yes it is. It's going to end up being a yes or a no, and I haven't got forever anymore."

"I can't agree to something like this cavalierly. This isn't... I need to discuss this with my staff."

Her eyes widened. "You need permission from Billy and Bevvy before you can _father a child_? Do they give you potty passes as well? Maybe a cookie when you're a good little captain?"

"It's not about fathering a child."

"It most certainly is!"

"Q. If that were all it was, yes, of course, my crew would have no input and it would be my private decision. But if that were all it was, the answer would be no. The entire reason I can't simply say no is that this is about stopping an alien species' civil war, which makes this a Prime Directive matter, which means-"

"I thought the Prime Directive applied to inferior cultures."

"We say less advanced, not inferior. And it's not that simple, either. The Prime Directive forbids us categorically from interfering in the culture of a pre-warp society. But it also affects our interactions with, and interference with, the internal affairs of all other cultures, outside the Federation. I cannot just blithely take sides in an alien civil war without discussing the situation with my advisors."

"Bullshit, mon capitaine," Q snapped. "How exactly did you manage to be the arbiter of the Klingon succession without interfering in a non-Federation culture?"

"The difference is, we _know_ the Klingons. We knew exactly what we were getting into. We understood their culture, we knew what the different sides stood for. All I know about the Q Continuum is what you've told me!"

"Just admit it, Picard, you're looking for a reason you can say 'no' where you don't have to take sole responsibility!"

"You're obviously not reading my mind," Picard snapped. "I'm looking for an objective opinion. I'm inclined to say yes. But I cannot say yes to a thing like this without making sure that people with less personal involvement than I have, people who are more objective than I am, agree with my reasons! It would be the height of irresponsibility-"

"You're inclined to say yes?" She looked every bit as flabbergasted as Picard himself must have, earlier.

Picard took a deep breath and straightened his shirt again. "I am. The issue of a war of this nature... quite aside from the fact that your weapons are destroying suns, even if there were no danger of collateral damage, it seems an unbelievable tragedy for such an ancient civilization to be destroyed this way, and it does seem as if humans have had some involvement in perhaps accelerating that process. I've risked my life to end wars where I had less at stake and humanity had less to do with it. But I have to be sure that I'm right. And despite what you say of me, I'm not perpetually convinced that my ideas are always right. I need another perspective."

Because he had so many reasons why he was leaning toward yes, and so many of them were bad. He wanted to save the universe from the Q war. He wanted to save the Q themselves, for the reason he'd just explained to Q. He wanted the Q Continuum in humanity's debt. He wanted to prove to the Q once and for all humanity's worthiness, and a half-human saving them from themselves would almost certainly do that. He wanted proof that the things Q had said about respecting him, after Q had spent so many years taunting him, tormenting him, challenging him, were the truth. He wanted to not have to say no to Q all the time, and if Q were sincere about any of this then this wasn't a test and he didn't have to say no to pass it and he didn't have to risk losing his humanity, or wielding power no human should ever have, or falling into a horrible trap, to do it. And after the Picard line had been destroyed so horribly and pointlessly by Robert and Rene dying in that fire, the idea of having a child at all had become less alien, less unthinkable, and a child with Q would never, ever die the way poor Rene had. And he wanted, badly, to be able to believe Q.

And most of these were absolutely terrible reasons for saying yes to something like this. Especially given all the excellent reasons for saying no, like the fact that having a child would completely disrupt his life and career, or the fact that this was _Q. _But the war. If the war was real and it could be ended this way, he would be unconscionably selfish for refusing. How could he live with himself if an entire sentient species was wiped out in an unexpected supernova because he refused to help Q?

But when he had so many incredibly bad reasons why he wanted to say yes, how could he be sure he wasn't fooling himself? What if he was overlooking something obvious because he wanted to overlook it? What if he were more influenced by Q's form change than he was admitting to himself, and his judgment was actually clouded by lust? (For Q. Of all people.) What if it was obvious to everyone but him that Q was lying through her teeth and this was all a game? He had to know.

His crew had no complicated mixed feelings about Q. They just disliked the entity, cleanly. Q wasn't here to flatter and seduce them, and no one would believe it if she tried. They'd have every reason to mistrust Q. So if they agreed with him that it was a good idea, then he'd know it was the right thing to do. And if he was overlooking something because he wanted to believe Q, they'd see it.

"You're thinking about saying yes." Q was still staring at him.

"For a nigh-omnipotent being your hearing is apparently awful."

"It's not my hearing that's in question," Q said. "I just..." She sat down heavily on the couch. "You were fighting every point I made. I thought you were going to say no."

"I usually fight every point you make."

"You usually say no."

"I haven't said yes yet." But he wanted to. Q looked... vulnerable. Maybe because of the form change. But no, Picard had seen it in Q while he was still in male form. The utter confusion of grief for someone Q had never expected could die, his voice breaking as if he were on the verge of tears... Picard had felt, then, as if he'd wanted to help Q somehow, but he hadn't known how. How did you help anyone deal with the death of a lover, let alone someone who had literal reason to think their lover was immortal? And now, Q looked stunned, as if she'd been living so long without hope and fighting anyway despite it, she didn't know what to do with the possibility that she might get what she wanted.

"You need your crew to validate you? You know they're going to assume everything I say is a lie, right?"

"Yes. So if you can convince them... I can be certain of my own logic."

"And if I can't convince them?"

"Q, if you are sincere, then I suggest you be convincing."

"Why would I lie about any of this? You think I'd pretend the Q are having a _civil war?_ Picard, if I wanted into your pants _that_ badly, there are easier ways! I never even wanted to admit this to you-"

She broke off. "Admit what to me?" Picard asked.

"Any of this." Q looked away. "You know, when you put someone on trial for being a grievously savage child-race, it doesn't really make one feel good about crawling to them begging for help because your own people are having a civil war. We were supposed to be better than this. I thought we were better than this. And you're the last person I wanted to admit to that we're not. Well, maybe not the last person, but certainly in the top five." She looked at him. "Trust me, Picard. If I were going to play some elaborate game on you, pretending that my people have gone to war, of all things, pretending that to you of all people, is not how I would go about it."

She had a point. "Why did you, then? If this is the truth, and you didn't want to tell me the truth... you've lied before when you didn't want to admit to something."

"I told Kathy I just wanted to have a baby. My biological clock was ticking off the aeons. She didn't believe me. Maybe I could have convinced her to do it if I'd told her the truth from the beginning... and she told me, telling the truth from the beginning, admitting to you how unrelievedly awful the situation is up front, was the only realistic way I could possibly get you to agree."

"You discussed how to approach me?"

"Well, how to approach some human who wasn't her. I didn't tell her I was thinking of going to you until after she'd already given me the advice."

Picard sighed. "That... is really the sort of thing she was probably advising you against doing."

"Hey, if she's going to turn me down it's none of her business who I turn to instead. She knows you, or she thinks she does, anyway. If I'd told her up front my objective was to talk to you, she'd have told me it was impossible, because she's read all your logs about me, and you've done a very good job of convincing Starfleet that you utterly despise me. She's never seen you interact with me, so she doesn't know any better."

"It's hardly as if I consider you a friend, Q."

"No... but you're thinking about maybe saying yes. That's... friendly, at least. Half my old friends are trying to kill me right now, so I'll take what I can get."

Picard inclined his head in acknowledgement. "So. Since time seems to be of some importance here, I will call in my staff and explain the situation. You... probably shouldn't be here during the discussion."

Q shook her head. "What, I'm supposed to go sit in the hallway while you debate my fate behind my back, as if I can't hear everything you say no matter where I am? I'm staying right here."

"Then at the very least let me do the talking. You have a remarkable talent for antagonizing people when you aren't even trying. If you want them to accept what you've told me, you should probably refrain from your usual sarcastic commentary."

She sighed ostentatiously. "_Fine_. My lips are sealed, Picard."

* * *

_Notes: The first female form Q takes is Caprica Six from Battlestar Galactica (the 2003 series). Peter David referred to Q taking the form of an overtly sexy blonde woman in the book Q-In-Law and as hilarious as it was, I always thought it felt wrong because I could not imagine a young sexy blonde bombshell looking like she has Q's mind behind her eyes. Then I watched Tricia Helfer play Caprica Six, plus Head!Six, and realized who would be capable of playing Q in a blonde, sexy, female form. However, she's still too young for Picard._

_Amanda Rogers as the deadliest fighter in the Q war is a theme I've hit in "Amanda Goes To War", "The Night The Day The War Began", "Snapshots from Eternity" chp 3 "I want for a child", "Seventeen Things That Might Have Happened to Q" chp. 16 "Assassin Revisited", and the "Judgement Day" arc, particularly "Judgement Day 6: The Partisan." Other writers, fan and pro, write a much softer Amanda, but no one but me actually seems to have thought through what the psychological impact on a species would be if they suddenly have the ability to kill each other when they never did before, and they are suddenly using it; thus, no one has thought through what the difference would be if one member of their species grew up in the expectation that if someone points a gun at her and shoots, she would die, or for that matter that she's the only Q in the Continuum without billions of years of history with all the other Q in the Continuum._

_Q saying that Picard is the best human she knows is a callback/homage to a different story on this site, writerofprose's "Thou Who Art But Air" (originally called "Pals?"), although in the context it also seemed like the only line that would make sense._

_Picard and Q's brief discussion about where the Q come from is intended as a direct callback and refutation of Q's exact same response to Janeway, where she asked where the Q came from if they don't reproduce and he answered that the Q have always existed. As this is a direct contradiction of both the spirit of Star Trek in general, where there are no true gods, merely extraordinarily powerful and highly evolved aliens (who got where they are by evolution, and whose level humanity may evolve to someday), and actual statements made by Quinn in "Death Wish", I have always assumed that Q was lying, probably because he didn't feel like seriously attempting to explain how the Q could have ever had new Q without ever having had children, or parents. Picard knows too much philosophy to fall for this crap, whereas Janeway is a scientist, not a humanities major._

_Next: The meeting with senior staff goes exactly as well as you would expect. And if anyone thinks Q is going to be able to keep her promise about keeping her lips sealed, you don't know Q very well... :-)_


End file.
